A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has shown that a person's chance of becoming obese increases by a whopping 57% if they have an obese friend. Surprisingly, family members had less of an influence than friends with the greatest influence being between mutual close friends.

Those who conducted the study noted that the same effect can be found for weight loss as well. However, since most people have been gaining and not losing weight over the last 32 years, the result is an obesity epidemic.

A physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the new study Dr. Nicholas Christakis noted that this might be caused by the way friends view fatness, i.e. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.

This new study has not been fully accepted by obesity researchers. The director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University Kelly Brownell expressed a pretty strong opinion regarding this: "I think there's a great risk here in blaming obese people even more for things that are caused by a terrible environment."